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DAVID ROWBOTHAM:
POEMS FOR AMERICA
A SERIES OF TEN POEMS
(With Histories)
Dedication:
TO WHOM I TURNED
America to whom I turned
looked after me the night I fell.
The spectre of the lantern learned
I was alone on the white owl’s hill.
The light went out and the step I took
led to the Rockies’ climbing air.
The fall was straight to the waiting oak.
I broke every branch that saved me there.
Timber the parent of my escape
proved American as the Bomb.
Spectral shouts and lights went up.
The bearers came and brought me home.
The white owl’s hill and the war-sea night
were the same as far as I have known,
if my numb fingers got it right:
and who broke the fall goes marching on.
AMERICA
America saved my life. I should like to
admit this conviction, free of fancy,
as the lasting reality time made of it.
It has been a long life. America, with whose
servicemen I shared a Pacific War perimeter
in a world of total combat, flew in
penicillin. While I was still in field
hospital, Truman dropped the Atom Bomb,
sending troops who had lived on their nerves
far too long half crazy in the night; and
guaranteeing my return home. Subsequently
I was to turn to America for periodic
residence, and to be given it amongst the
most generous people I have known. During
one sojourn, American oak broke a bad fall
that could have removed me as the Pacific
nearly did. At the Mayo Clinic in Minnesota,
where for several years I was a visitor,
cortisone was discovered; it sustains
breathing, and for that purpose I require it.
Hence this series of Poems For America,
given the specific title of America My Breath,
with Dedication and appended Histories.
If, in the series, I seem to have written as
a pillager, putting my New World to work for
me, I have done so as a person who found
there, for all its faults, a great nation,
and a sense of freedom and the remarkable.
I hope American friends will accept my
examination of their epic history. I have
used it as a warning image of what can be
lost, like breath.- D.R.
AMERICA MY BREATH
1. New Light on Spoons
In mesa saloons
I see the blue moon’s
spoons dissolve.
Somewhere new light
puts out the prairie
and the lantern and a bear
goes home in the night:
the thorax of pillage,
the man in the moonwalk
on the village:
an engine at large
swallowing at random
what atoms bury.
In the light before
that outlaws speech,
joined with the dumb
we stand by gallows,
we are gallows-ripe;
what then swallows
up earth in the air?
We are the end of the rope.
Meanwhile lilacs
in the dooryard bloom
for logs of war
as large as bear,
dogwood in Shiloh,
Savannah sad willow,
at Gettysburg, stones;
and, for the unknown tomb,
the eternal flame
in contorted spoons.
2. Kill Villages
Ice which is slow
and snow which is swift
where the dark drift
of the wood grows polar,
sizzle and bite
borealis the night,
telling a thousand
lakes of killer
pigtail feather
forces that roast
game alive -
prime priest and seasoned
trapper torsoes
spitting fat -
telling them that
kill villages
are the nation. But none,
not a feather,
hears swift and slow:
to the bellies of the tribes
of the god that dazzles
the wind over us,
the bite and sizzle’s
borealis.
3. Death at Maiden Rock
(On the High Mississippi)
Like the wake of a weapon,
the biggest rainbow
over Lake Pepin
plunges to drown;
and everything there
goes down.
Death,
told in stone
at Maiden Rock
to calamitous air,
which sucked in shock
like an unseen gorging surge,
goes down;
clasped
by the biggest rainbow’s
shape eclipsed
by a sharp moon stuck
in Red Wing’s throat,
and an arrow in her lover’s.
Too late,
the chicadee.
For what awakened bird
could gain on quivers
of feathers so quick
they were bound to break
rapids before a shriek
shamed god?
And too small,
the great white owl:
Chippewa shadow
to swift White Horse
warlike lover and a curse
to trysting Sioux;
vengeance has its fathers
and daughters have their due.
Who’ll cleanse my kingdom
of this which dishonours me?
What god of the moon
could follow them down;
what wings recover
rock for the lover,
what song for the chicadee?
They flew into a lake
of the kind comets make
with a streaming tail
like an atom’s sail
over Pepin,
slamming the waters
of the python’s den;
and took with them a moon,
and a night undone;
and the lake sucked in
the shrieks that covered them:
o screams of ruin
and slams of air
and my own serpent there:
echoes the god of the river,
gulping at the rapids’
gluttonous fever
till four suns rose,
when the women’s hands
kept inconsolable choir
from the shore
as feathered canoes,
with leaves of maple
and the plumage of the swan,
chained the waters,
for the most crucified of daughters,
with a wild festoon.
Maid and Brave consumed:
leaving behind
the written mind
of a wailing kingdom
and written stone
and verandah song
raising dead centuries
that the living possess
because a rainbow does.
And above the surge,
the refuge:
and the refuge is the song.
Forever in the great
depression of that voice
tuned to the violin
that beggars bow and string,
the woman lays down time
and chimes in.
It is my mother’s voice;
and choirs of verandahs
under a cannibal moon.
“The moon shines tonight
on pretty Red Wing,
the breeze is sighing,
the nightbird’s crying,
for afar ’neath his star
her Brave is sleeping,
while Red Wing’s weeping
her heart away.”
4. Mad Hatter and White Owl
The tunnelled mine
of trove Montana,
because of the human
nature of mine and man,
mightily owns him
as he goes in
towards tenebrae,
a stetson corked
and a sixgun cocked
in his crock of a barrow
that to the clawed gavel
of his hands yields
midges and mudcake
nuisance gravel:
seams of pennyweight
safe value never
peter out.
I’m there when,
like the white owl
flying the Rockies
that he shoots
and eats but doesn’t
know what for,
he sits for a while
after his meal,
wet beard sated,
to preen his boots,
then exquisitely tilts
the barrow and lets
his worked mine pour
its trove between
his tunnelled legs,
down and into
Montana once more,
my gold mad hatter
of mighty-sore,
of dig and mutter
and American dreams
among safe seams.
I’m out of town
when he packs it in
as fast as you’d pull
and punch a gun,
his body beside
the resplendent owl
he couldn’t wolf;
like a seam of the self:
golden white,
most golden in the world,
swears Montana,
that he brought down
from the flying Rockies,
maddened by the look
of nuisance mud.
As much as he could,
he’d cottoned on.
5. Eureka in St Paul
It was the day
that I drove on by,
pretending not
to have seen you
in the city of Scott
Fitzgerald and Great
Gatsby: Eureka
in St Paul. Be quicker
said cathedral in
the candle, forsaker
said the shroud of Turin.
They found each other
and found departure
on unbearable altars:
by being together
where the parable is
the sacrifice of both.
Two churches spoke the truth.
To the shouted parody
of a passion play,
the candle went out.
Till the day
that I drove on by,
never were we cold,
and never did we die.
When the floods came
and filled the falls,
suddenly there heaved
a miracle’s rebirth;
water lived.
Water lived on earth.
Its force contained you,
as our arms together
in a wilderness did,
when our one purpose was
somehow to be warm.
6. The Perfect Birch
America, who speaks?
When the coiled lip
of the tin cup slakes
like a cottonmouth,
and the neck breaks,
this table’s for both.
Under gables that changed
to gibbets I’m hanged
with the Barabbas
of your breath.
From the cataract ibis
of a netherscarp
and moons of fargo
taking shape,
to the sacred cloth
of a war’s inducted
doused in death;
from tin tobacco
telescope armies
that march on rumours
and the moon’s monolith
campfires once acted;
or the many moons
in a helmet’s sleep -
Spain’s, perhaps,
as the axes leap
(conquistador,
scalps of the cross;
and a breastplate rips
the rainbow moss) –
I’m forbidden entry
to the ultimate country.
A prairie flake speaks
the mind of peaks
and the bear that the fevered
pine cabins fear
when veiled and avid
maples snowing amber
as beasts lumber
sing silently the fall;
and you, extreme eagle,
with gorges in your grail
of lustres,
and your wings steep maps
vastly worn
among vine clusters, fly
an America born
to avalanching air
and a scaling coach
in a pinnacle’s eye.
Flag and bugle
and spitfire birch,
and the rocket that waits
to gutter the sky:
America my breath,
as breathless as I:
cannon at the gates
of a captured church
uproot ambush
and a whippoorwill
by a shut paddle-wheel
and a moored watermill;
and attrition runs
fireballs of guns
for escaping hates
that hunt the harbours
of earth and limb,
where you hungered to be
the perfect birch
of a gleaming hymn.
Whose were the robbers
that set these free;
whose the thumb
that signalled them?
Creature into human,
breath trails a sash
of chases that summon
the watches of the lakes.
Cry barricade,
the language of the breed:
the halted lynx
of omen.
It reaps like a blade
what the rainladder thinks,
and the rainladder’s rungs
climb in; guns
munch mammoth moment,
each bite cavernous,
a galleyblack landfall,
and a hurdy-gurdy handle
grinds in a white house
a vacuum for a candle.
In ballroom time,
in the fireplace,
the hurdy-gurdy man
like a nursery rhyme
plays the first drawn
breath of America’s
magical release.
Put the powder in;
the cannon spring
deep into the marrow
of a birth’s tomorrow,
till a hurdy-gurdy drones
of lagoons of bones
with no place for July;
and all the straw wagons
drive on by -
and change into guns;
and we into legions
of absent ones;
into the staff
warcries can’t reach
when over the hogans
of a tributary cliff
their cataracts flow
to the wounded nave
of a Navajo
wielding heat:
an archbishop burns;
antiquities meet;
the mesa blows up
at the touch of a cup
about me; I breathe
into a gibbet torch
from a Spanish pew
denouement:
crushed moccasins
and the crust of a march.
How will you live
without me; how
slake those cotton moons
coiled in a perfect birch?
7. I Wonder Who Owns the Fourth of July
There’s a brigand in my bones
and I don’t know why.
I wonder who owns
The Fourth of July.
Birthdays in peril:
the yankee doodle
dandy fiddle
and the lookout squirrel;
the flag on the hat;
the rabble house
where pilgrims spat
on brigand shoes
and buckles;
and the biggest
birthday to a star
was tapped with spigots
and toasted more
than bread:
it’s bones,
worn down to why,
to stealth on the stones
of theft going by
from house to house
in snarling shoes:
all vacuum, no dawns,
my domain and I:
no windowsill rose,
no worlds without end -
Gotterdammerung,
wild bones of why -
no estates of day,
no engines of towns
but windless mills
that once danced gales
to the sawdust huddle
of wicks of why -
mavourneen of mirrors
and vanishing walls,
I smother in the cradle
of smiles from you.
How adamant the hills!
where galleys of guns,
widows of iron,
their rivers undone,
sweep through,
and no palm’s strewn
for a toothsawn
whisky hodown’s
hammered fiddle
and the banjo’s cry
grinding the stones
of shoes of prey
as the big earth wheels
breath’s gardens by
in a doorstep robin’s
orange eye –
plumage polar
and boulder hidden:
an Armageddon,
a Stonewall to the sun’s
stampeding colour
in the claiming gorge
at the banjo’s edge
of pilgrimage
to a clinking camp’s
vain parliaments,
that scupper the lamps
with the palest guns,
and brief Brigadoons
with auld lang synes
dying into the day
plunge out;
shout why.
Birthdays and bones.
Birthdays and bones.
I wonder who owns
the Fourth of July.
8. Carolina in New York
(An American Dream)
When the world walks past the door
and the black woman’s face
looks in like a stump on fire,
the white man, fearing the blaze,
runs for the lobby stairs
and trips.
Unconscious, he begins to dream.
It all started with a stream,
a far Carolina stream
big enough for trading ships,
and for the docks
where he tried to sell her twice
at better than bargain price,
she was so damned ugly.
Giving her bare back
whipflicks daily,
telling her to get beautiful,
he made the waiting witch:
there was the murmur of a valley;
and a dream he couldn’t watch;
and a fever on the docks:
and one day she flew away
on a flamboyant planter’s wand
imperiously waved
at thighs that promised fever pitch
and finally enslaved
every castle in Carolina,
never mind the looks;
and Carolina burned.
9. The Glass of Alamogordo
The waters and the leaves of autumn rivers meet
where walls slam down in tunnels of retreat
from the last alarm’s outbreak of horns and bells
high in the locked rocky red hills
of visiting Montana.
The day the desert turned to glass, the seas
received the sand; it washed about our feet,
lassoing them, sent to recover us,
and the time in the bunker was
Alamogordo’s visit to the world.
The bear begins its lonely gallop
home, the switchback bend snaps boulders,
smoke sways among the meadowlarks and alders,
and standing like a burnt stump in the stirrup
you go roping cattle so they won’t kill
themselves: noose and silhouette and gale
against the gloaming.
That night jungleweight
swayed with unlocked rock and we held tight
to the tentpole we’d long dreamt of letting go,
never dreaming the stampedes of homesteads
between glass fingers to the seabeds;
never dreaming the lasso we’d be galloping to.
10. My American Grandsons
- America, who speaks? -
Go out and watch
the sun set
and tell me what
you think.
Do you speak of much
or fatal pain,
or, flinching, let
all speech abstain
from speech?
Kissed goodnight,
not wholly worn,
the wonder-sight
of first sunset
curls up in bed,
day in a bloom,
and breathes in this room –
America my grandsons’
manger said.
Go out and watch,
and tell me what
we came to be:
Too much
for a world to judge,
there was pain,
sail red,
and a baleful age
beyond the sea.
Histories
* mesa: tableland, as at Los Alamos, hometown of the bomb.
* “When lilacs last in the dooryard bloomed”: Whitman on Lincoln.
* Shiloh; Savannah; Gettysburg: Civil War battlefields.
* borealis: clouds fanned by the aurora borealis, northern lights, occur along the 49th parallel above the Great Lakes and in Canada’s northern reaches. Long ago, the cannibal tribes of the
North-Eastern Woods gave the lights the names of gods, as we did when we saw them.
* Maiden Rock: today, part of a village, on the Wisconsin side of the high Mississippi where the river bends and falls from St Paul, Minnesota, to form Lake Pepin.
* Pepin: the upper Mississippi’s largest mainstream lake, a leisure resort. Centuries ago, at the time of this legend, the precipitous Rock fell sheer to the water. Today it does not, having receded enough for a highway to skirt its base.
*. Red Wing, the Princess: The story of this royal Siouan maid and her Chippewa brave, White Horse, has, like all legends, many versions. A plaque set in a cairn not far from the post offfice near Maiden Rock compresses one. A booklength poem by the Mississippi poet Ruth Persons extends another. The version here is a compact of the many. The presence of the river’s spanking tourist yacht, Princess Red Wing, indicates how positively the river people feel about the story.
* Red Wing, the Song: Afer Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha”, with its death of Minnehaha, whose memorial grave is at Minneapolis, this story is one of the most tragic in North American folklore. The lovers, whose bodies were never recovered, are romanticised in the song “Red Wing” composed by Mills (music) and Chattaway (lyrics) in 1907. The song travelled the world in sheet music, as far as the farms of Australia where the young girl who was to become my mother used to play it on the family piano. I learned it from her knee, never dreaming I would one day walk the legend’s ground.
* Red Wing, the City: once the world’s largest inland riverport, served by rail and steamboat; situated on the Minnesotan side of the Mississippi, upstream from Maiden Rock, and 3000 kilometres from the Gulf. Now the city is served by nuclear reactors further upstream.
* Red Wing, the Name: By those most loyal to the legend, the city is thought to be named after the Indian maid murdered by her deranged father Chief Red Wing. The name Red Wing is said to have derived from the Indian words for duck-feathers painted red and woven into the headdresses of the kingdom. The name Mississippi derives from the nearest equivalent to what the earliest Indians called Great River.
* Montana: America’s mountainous “treasure” state, rich in minerals, two-thirds of it rising inside the Rockies.
* Eureka: When Scott Fitzgerald (1896-1940), after a night of scribble and coffee in his room in his hometown of St Paul, found the right ending for his novel “The Great Gatsby”, he rushed into the street shouting “Eureke!”. It was found and finished.
* St Paul: capital of Minnesota, twin city of Minneapolis, and seat of a Roman Catholic archdiocese since 1888. Its metropolitan cathedral grew from the log chapel of St Paul. Fitzgerald was raised a Catholic.
* cottonmouth: the venomous American moccasin.
.* America: created the 20th Century.
* Barabbas: “Now Barabbas was a robber.” – John 18, v.40.
* fargo: image taken from the first long-distance American stagecoach company, Wells Fargo. The city of Fargo, North Dakota, was named after the company’s founder.
* helmet’s sleep: A Spanish helmet, dented by an axe, was handled by the Indian chief in the Kevin Costner film, “Dancing with Wolves”; empires had come and gone.
* spitfire birch: The Spitfire that won the Battle of Britain was made of birch – said to be the most symbolic of American trees - to give it superiority over the Messerschmidt.
* barricade: “I have a rendezvous with Death/ At some disputed barricade...” – Alan Seeger, b. New York 1888, d. Verdun 1916.
* black; hurdy-gurdy; white house: Now an American shrine, and the centre of Fourth of July celebrations, The White House was built by black slave labour in the 1790s and completed in 1800. The music at its opening was played by all sorts of musical instruments, including the hurdy-gurdy. It was burnt by the British in 1814, when, to disguise the damage, it was painted “birch white”: hence its name.
* hogan: a Navajo house.
* “Death Comes for the Archbishop” (Willa Cather, 1927; adapted), Santa Fe – founded by the Spaniards, 1609; headquarters of Spanish, Indian, Mexican, Confederate and US governors; tableland (mesa) way in to Los Alamos and the atom bomb.
* moccasin: the American cottonmouth; and footwear perfected by the North American Indians.
* Birthdays in peril: b. Toowoomba 1924; diagnosis, cryptic chronic interstitial cellular breath and bone breakdown.
* mavourneen: of the great gaelic migrations.
* Brigadoon: This 1947 Broadway musical was a fantasy adapted from Germelhausen, a story by the 19th Century German writer Friedrich Gerstacker. The German story was about a concealed community that lived only for a day each century and, when it vanished, seemed to take the world with it. The idea was visualised in Brigadoon.
* Stonewall: the geographical place where “Stonewall” Jackson (1824-1863) withstood the Union army for nine months at Shenandoah, at attritional cost to both sides, and from which his nickname derived.
* Carolina: Charlston in South Carolina, founded in 1670, became the major port for the American slave trade.
* Alamogordo: Airfield site of the first detonation: New Mexico, July 16, 1945. The desert surface fused to glass.
* Meadowlark: state bird of Montana.
* Alder: related to the birch.
* American Grandsons: Two of my grandsons were born in America while their mother was doing postgraduate research in medicine at the Mayo Clinic. All grandsons today are American-minded.
PACIFIC STAR
Among the war medals I hold I came to value most the one that meant one’s small watch in the immensity of seas and nights during years which, like the war and the stars they defined, were ultimate. Within and beyond the compass that developed because of this, I found my stories of societies at war, and years of physical travel that became, like thought, as systemic as breathing. My present years in particular have, because of age, reinforced the ultimate. Hence the book’s sub-title, and its company of stars.
I am glad that a book of mine again engages war in a way anticipated by my Penguin Selected Poems: 1945-1993, and that it contains yet another lot of poems, a feature of later books, owing their existence to the physical fact of mind that is the United States. This time the lot is considerable. As a schoolboy, and onwards, I ”read” America; and, since the 1970s, I have travelled and looked often to America, with whom I served, and have been generously received there.
From the Penguin Book three related poems have been republished. I am putting in, for example, “The Moment”, one of my earliest poems published by the Sydney Bulletin and anthologised for 50 years. Its first draft was written in Bougainville. I am also republishing from the Penguin Book “Mullabinda”, which was anthologised for 25 years and then, because of political interference, shelved; and “Scuttled Bottled Corked Washed Up”. From The Ebony Gates (UCQPress, 1996) I have added, in revised form, “The Lovetree”, “Humdingers” and “The Lament”.
The book may reflect how long ago it is that I fought for “survivor’s words”. If it does, it may also be seen as a final answer to the question of how then, for the rest of my life, I fought to write amongst people who withstood me for the rest of theirs. They were feudal, and another reason that I looked to America for periodic residence and relief. There can be more to surviving than returning.
New poems, and all but the six given above are completely new, were published by The Weekend Australian Review, The Australian’s Review of Books, Southerly and the Goethe Institute. A number were used in anthologies in North America.
I have to point out that my list of book-titles includes several volumes that were subsumed by publishers under the titles of others. I lost books; now restored.
Notes, some amounting to little histories, have been provided for certain poems where, as in Poems For America, all references seemed needed. For the rest, they are there in case I am not around to give anymore readings and comment. There is a transport standing by with my name on it, even though I don’t want to leave the world.– D.R., Brisbane, Aug. 14, 2000
[The above preface entitled Pacific Star introduces a larger volume of poems bearing the same title, from which “Poems For America” has been separated out as being worthy of further attention. The series has been placed on the Internet for this reason. All publications on the Internet are the copyright of the author. – DAVID ROWBOTHAM. August 30, 2000]
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